Blood disposal

Bleeding them dry

Squeamishness and bureaucracy are a bloody nuisance

SLAUGHTERHOUSES don't come much nicer than John Chadwick's. Clean and smartly designed, with walls and disinfecting tanks in brushed steel, the small red-meat facility in Wigan is regarded by others in the animal-killing business with something approaching awe. “It's too good for a slaughterhouse—it's more like a palace,” says Brian George, a South Wales abattoir owner. According to carefully cultivated legend, a local hygiene inspector once said that he would rather go there for an operation than any nearby hospital.

But new European regulations on animal waste may force the closure of this model meatpacker. The problem centres on the “sticking” (ie, throat-cutting) part of the slaughtering process. At present, the blood from about five cattle and 40 lambs a week goes into the sewer system. This method of disposal, used by about a third of slaughterhouses, is out of favour in light of health scares and general public queasiness. In future, all waste blood must be incinerated.

In Mr Chadwick's case, the offensive liquid will have to be carted away, probably to Prosper De Mulder, a Doncaster-based outfit that dominates the British animal-waste market. This company is likely to handle most of the extra 150,000 tonnes of waste blood resulting from the new rules. The government reckons that disposal costs will rise from £16 to £60-80 a tonne. Distant regions may well pay even more.

The new regulations pose little threat to large slaughterhouses, which produce blood in such volume that it is worth selling on to fertiliser companies or pet-food manufacturers. So some consolidation is likely. The cost will be paid by the consumer, by farmers, and by the animals themselves, especially if they are trucked over longer distances to the surviving slaughterhouses.

And it may make it more difficult to track the spread of disease. Mr Chadwick's slaughterhouse, like some other small ones, is a complete meat-processing facility—cows go in one end, steak and sausages come out the other. If customers get ill, it is easy to work out why.

The scientific case for the new rules is fuzzy. The government's BSE advisory committee looked into blood-disposal methods in 1996, at the height of the public health panic, and saw no problem in sending surplus corpuscles down the drain. Using raw blood as a fertiliser or burying it in the ground—two other means of getting rid of it—may strike some as distasteful, but are not actually dangerous.

So what lies behind the new regulations? John Strak, of the Whole Hog, a pig farming journal, points to post-disaster paranoia. “When it comes to food, nobody wants to talk about risk analysis. Banning things is much simpler.”

The slaughtermen are less charitable. They say the authorities want to close small facilities, which are expensive to inspect; they also believe that other countries are too corrupt or disorganised to enforce the regulations. Many, like Mr Chadwick, are dragging their feet, hoping for a change of plan. This has worked in the past—most recently with new rules banning the burying of dead farm animals, which farmers said were too complex and costly. But it is an odd way to run the food industry.